Copy Editing; New Yorker; BBC Music; Musical Records in the Guinness Book

Just a bit of this and that today:




01.  Between You and Me (Confessions of a Comma Queen) by Mary Norris.   Reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Patricia T. O'Conner, author of Woe is I.


Mary Norris was a copy editor for the New Yorker magazine and has come up with some memorable information... like the name of the person who was responsible for the hyphen in the title of Moby-Dick.. it wasn't Melville, we are told.


She also doesn't feel too bad when a friend of hers said, while looking for sunglasses, "Are those they?"  She also has a chapter on dirty words and is a fan of all kinds of pencils.   Sounds like a book my brother Joe in Ohio would love to read.


02.  BBC Music Magazine this month has an article about musical records.  Guinness World Records is 60 years old, and since it's inception in 1955, these musical records have appeared in it's pages.


A.  U.S. Composer John Cage's Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible) was written in 1987 and began to be performed in 2001.  The organ keys are held down mechanically until the next change of notes is required.  Such changes happen usually once or twice each year.  However, there is currently an extra long note being played, and the next note is scheduled for 2020.  The total piece will finish in 626 years time.


B.  The fastest that Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee has been played on the violin was  by Ben Lee, who in 2011 played it in 54.24 seconds.


C.  Mark Gottlieb, violinist, played a solo adaptation of Handel's Water Music under water in Olympia, Washington, in 1975.


D.  Tim Storms is a basso profundo extraordinaire from Indiana, who can sing all the way down to the G seven octaves below the lowest note on a piano.  He also can do high notes and may be even more versatile than Ivan Rubro of the Soviet Union.


E.  In October 2010, Dutch maestro, Bas Clabbers used a baton measuring 4.25 meters to  keep the players of Netherlands ensemble Harmonie Amiciticia in strict tempo.  Isn't that a stick around 12 feet long?!


Now that you are astounded, let me say adieu for today.  Lots to do.


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